SHEAD 2007.216

Garry Shead’s mixed-media painting embodies the political mood of Sydney in the 1960s. This artwork was shown in 1966 in one of Shead's first solo exhibitions at Watters Gallery, Sydney, at which time its sexual content drew public ire. Despite gallerist Frank Watters being threatened with arrest, he refused to close the exhibition. Much of the furore was focused on the irreverent way Shead had portrayed members of the North Shore upper class: here, for instance, the nude ‘Wahroonga lady’ squats awkwardly, her undergarments strewn across the canvas. 

This painting established a recurrent theme in Shead’s practice: peeling away the veneer of gentility in Australian society to expose latent carnal desires. The title of the artwork alludes to North American author William S Burrough's sexually explicit anti-novel Naked Lunch (1959), which similarly attracted criticism and was the subject of an obscenity trial. A further reference is to French impressionist Edouard Manet's celebrated painting Le dejeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the grass) 1863 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), in which a naked woman is seated with her clothed male companions and was considered shocking by the standards of nineteenth-century France.